7/09/2009 @ 3:27PM

The Longest Tweet In History

On Oct. 14, 1947, Chuck Yeager became the first man to travel faster than the speed of sound. On May 6, 1954, Roger Bannister became the first man to run a four-minute mile. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong was the first to set foot on the moon.

Benjamin Franklin’s maxim about the inevitability of taxes is so familiar that it has the ring of a cliche. But it suggests a profound truth: Taxes are a certainty we dread almost as much as death. – Steve Forbes, Flat Tax Revolution, Regnery 2005

So how did Buley do it? Twitter famously doesn’t allow messages of more than 140 characters. However, Twitter’s programmable API now allows messages up to 247 characters to slip through. All messages are truncated at 136 characters; Twitter then uses the remaining four characters to display a space and ellipsis.

Here’s the secret though: The ellipsis is hyperlinked. Clicking it takes you to the single tweet, where all 247 characters can be displayed.

Other’s have apparently noticed, too, indicating that the phenomenon might go back as far as May. That tweet, however, cut off at a mere 246 characters.

At the time, the long-winded Tweets were dismissed as bug in the javascript code that published tweets on the Web.

But this is a feature of the programmable Twitter back-end, where it seems that Twitter has made room for 247-character messages. One indication: In the information Twitter returns when posting a message, there’s a special name space that indicates whether the message was truncated or not. Another hint is found in the ellipsis: Twitter seems to have deliberately designed a user interface to handle its long-winded tweet pariahs.

Twitter explains its 140-character limit matter-of-factly: “The Twitter message limit of 140 characters was based on the limit of 160 characters imposed by SMS,” wrote co-founder Biz Stone in an official blog post. “We just needed some room to include your name in front of the message.”

So, is it a bug or feature? We’ve Twittered a question to the chief Tweets. Start following our tweets at @ ForbesTech to find out.